The settlement of the ancient Slavs is one of the most important processes in the evolution of civilizational, geopolitical, and ethnic processes in medieval Europe. Slavism stood out as an independent ethnic group from among the Indo-European peoples around the first millennium BC. e. Several waves of the Great Migration of Peoples, mass migrations at the beginning of the 1st millennium AD also provoked the mobility of Slavic elements. Some tribes are actively involved in mass migrations. In the V-VI centuries, the settlement of the Slavs is rapidly gaining ever wider scope. During this period, they appear in the Balkans, in the Baltic, in Moravia, and advance into the Central Russian plain steppe in the east. Such a scattered settlement of the Slavs provokes their division in the middle of the 1st millennium AD into three large branches: western, southern and eastern.
Southern Slavs
This branch was represented by the tribes of Macedonians, Montenegrins, Bulgars and Slovenes. Their shelter was the Balkan Peninsula, on which they settled in the V-VI centuries of our era. In addition to the peninsula itself, the southern Slavs also occupied part of the territories adjacent to it. By the time of their final settlement in the Balkans, they were already at the stage of decomposition of the clan community and were ready for the formation of the first political entities. Perhaps their first full-fledged state was Sklavia, which arose in the 7th century and existed before the 10th. The descendants of those peoples are the modern Macedonians, Serbs, Croats, Montenegrins, Slovenes and partially Bosniaks.
Western Slavs
The resettlement of the Slavs of this branch occurred in the same period. However, they moved in a different, more northerly direction than the Slovenes and Bulgars. This group of peoples, which gave the modern world Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks (as well as a number of ethnic groups that were not able to become full-fledged peoples: Luzhichans, Silesians, Kashubians), settled in vast territories from the Vistula to the banks of the Elbe River. Also, traces of representatives of this branch were discovered by archaeologists in the Baltic. This branch of the Slavs was in the middle of the 1st millennium AD about the same level of development with the southern ones, which allowed them to create their first state on the territory of modern Czechia already in the 7th century.
The resettlement of the eastern Slavs
This significant group occupied the vast East European Plain. In the 5th – 6th centuries, there was only a decomposition of the primitive communal system. In addition, the eastern Slavs did not have in the immediate vicinity highly developed peoples that would stimulate the emergence of political entities here. As any relevant map will demonstrate, the resettlement of the Eastern Slavs took place mainly in the Northern Black Sea Region, in the basin of the Dnieper, Pripyat, Dvina, Bug, Dniester, Seim, Sula and others. And then they moved further north, pushing back their medieval rivals - the Finogor tribes. From the 7th century AD, the Eastern Slavs begin to unite in large-scale tribal unions. A similar alliance could include hundreds of tribes united around one of the most powerful tribes. Their first significant political formation became one of the most powerful medieval states. Speech, of course, about Kievan Rus.